A biaxially oriented polyamide based resin film composed of nylon in major components is excellent in toughness, gas-barrier, pinhole resistance, transparency, printing property and the like, so that it is widely utilized as a packaging material in various kinds of foods such as a variety of liquid food, aqueous food, frozen food, retort food, paste food, cattle meat and aquatic food. Particularly in recent years, it is used extensively in packaging of retort food. Such polyamide based resin film is laminated with polyolefin based resin films such as polyethylene and polypropylene, folded in two parallel to its machine direction, then thermally adhered in three sides and cut out to give a bag with one side opened and three edges sealed in an opened state, in which various kinds of food etc. are filled and sealed, then sterilized by heating in boiling water before being supplied to market.
In the case of using polyamide based resin film, however, there are some instances that warpage occurs at corners of packaging bag after heat sterilization treatment to yield a curling phenomenon of four sides in S-shape (hereinafter called S-shaped curl phenomenon), resulting in remarkable deterioration of appearance as packaging goods. Therefore, regarding a method of reducing such curl phenomenon, as shown in Patent reference 1, there has been proposed a method to adjust a biaxially oriented polyamide based resin film to a specified value of product of its boiling water shrinkage percentage and percentage change of molecular orientation angle in the direction of film width, but the method needs an extremely high temperature in thermal fixation or excess thermal relaxation after stretching to enhance dimensional stability in boiling water treatment, thus it poses problems that the toughness and pinhole resistance of the resultant film are deteriorated.
Therefore, the present inventors have devised and proposed a method for obtaining a biaxially oriented polyamide based resin film free from S-shaped curl phenomenon without lowering toughness and pinhole resistance by adjusting boiling water shrinkage percentage and refraction index of film within a specified numeric range as described in Patent reference 2.
Patent reference 1: Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication Hei 4-103335 (1992)
Patent reference 2: Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication Hei 8-174663 (1996)